The first two episodes of Star City have arrived, and that means an incredible dive back into the early days of the For All Mankind timeline, but from the Soviet point of view. For new viewers, there’s literally nothing you need to know about this show, other than the fact that in this timeline, the USSR’s space agency, Roscosmos, successfully landed humans on the Moon, well before NASA did. From there, the show dives into the men and women who struggled to make this happen, which includes a lot of surveillance. And, while this cold, unforgiving life — lacking in personal freedoms and privacy — is well known to historians, For All Mankind depicted this through very specific characters. And, one character, Irina Morozova (Svetlana Efremova), has been a ruthless enforcer and intelligence operative since Season 4. But, here, in the opening episodes of Star City, back in 1969, the younger Irina, as played by Agnes O'Casey, is...nice?
“Actually, at first, I misunderstood where we were starting Irina from,” O’Casey tells Inverse. “I assumed she'd be much more confident. I assumed she'd be much more at ease with the brutality of the time. But then I sat down with [showrunners] Matt [Wolpert] and Ben [Nedivi], and they were like, ‘No, no, we're starting her right from the beginning.’ You see her at the inception of her journey, which is so fun and dramatically exciting. Everyone knows where she's going. To see this sort of quivering version of her is exciting and more realistic.”
